Large Protest Must Greet Jiang

Asked about the potential for civilian protest at his various stopping points in the first Chinese Presidential visit to America in 12 years, President Jiang Zemin told a New York Times reporter that, as a guest of President Clinton, the responsibility for maintaining order was not his concern. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, speaking to an NBC reporter the day before Zemin arrived in Honolulu on the first stage of his visit, suggested that he would not have "a totally fuzzy time." Exactly how "fuzzy" Zemin's visit to Boston will be this Saturday remains to be seen.

The historic nature of Zemin's arrival in America, the expected crowds and the amoral role Harvard has taken by giving him a podium from which to speak, requires a far greater focus on the method of protest than we have seen from the Harvard activist community to date.

Method, not message is the issue--for the message is clear. Jiang is without question implicated in the large-scale violations of human rights within his country. He is implicated in the jailing of political dissidents, in the harsh and arbitrary application of capital punishment, in the subjugation of Tibet, in the construction and maintaining of a vast system of prison labor camps comparable to some of the worst years of the Soviet gulag. He is one of the most inappropriate guests in all of Harvard's past to speak in Sanders Theatre.

There is not much, then, to be said to Jiang by a student or citizen protest on American territory. We are left with two roles in the upcoming visit: to commemorate the victims of tyranny, and to speak to our own government.

For while Jiang, who has implicitly countenanced the death of critics young and old, will avert his gaze with relative ease from the worst that Harvard and the citizens of Cambridge and Boston can throw at his feet, there will be many others watching.

The Clinton administration will be watching, as it searches for a new American response to the troubling situation of a possibly hostile and emerging superpower. We cannot hope to dictate the conditions of American engagement but we can hope to provide a forum for the moral voice of America, an insistence that the indecencies of the Chinese communist regime not be drowned out by the realpolitik of day to day political negotiation. For if we have learned anything from the last 60 years of the 20th century, it is that a corrupt and repressive government, if ignored or appeased, will only grow in strength.

And the world will be watching--a world that looks so often to the American media and that now, thanks to the mixed blessings of the satellite networks, will be watching us from some of the most tightly regulated regions of the world.

We must show our respect for those who have gone before us, who have died in the service of a freedom we so freely enjoy, and we must show that prosperity and complacency do not go hand in hand. We must show that, secure in our freedom, we challenge our government not to appease, not to ignore, but to engage the Chinese government with a moral courage that it has failed to show thus far. --Simon J. DeDeo '00